Elon Musk’s Next Logical Move — Electric Airplanes — Modular Strategies for Sustainable Global Mobility
In Australia, Elon Musk built an electric battery plant that can back up the grid within milliseconds.
And he’s losing money with it.
Tesla’s 100 MW/129MWh Powerpack system near Jamestown, Australia provides backup power for South Australia’s energy grid. 30–40% of the electricity it provides goes unpaid because the grid only measures electricity pumped into the system a full 6 seconds after a breakdown event.
The Powerpack farm responds in milliseconds: 0.14 seconds the last time it had to back up the grid.
Why lose money instead of adding in an artificial 6 second delay?
Because Elon Musk’s next project is beautiful.
But it’s not about airplanes.
Next project:
Provide a huge number of low income households with electric batterypacks, and due to the very low latency, connect them over some distance (it’s likely they would be in the same area) into a mega-plant.
A plant much larger than the Jamestown Powerpack, which is already the largest in the world, and already essential to Australia’s electric grid.
South Australia’s premier Steven Marshall has already voiced opinions against the 250 MW/650 MWh virtual power plant, which would unite 50,000 low-income residential units outfitted with Powerwall 2 systems.
The project, however, is brilliant.
You give low-income households not just energy independence, but a means to generate income while stabilizing the electric grid of an entire country, nay, continent, and you create a modular and scalable pathway to global energy independence.
Musk’s company would likely act as a legal intermediary between individual households and the grid, and would also likely take a percentage, but the rest would go to low-income individuals as much needed financial stability.
A background buzz of solar paychecks slowly but surely trickling into disadvantaged areas.
Beautiful.
And once the project itself is completed, it becomes proof of concept for a much better kind of battery array. One that doesn’t need to be out in the desert.
It can be implemented anywhere, and all of a sudden suburbia becomes low-latency solar heaven, and low-income areas globally become the world’s electricity producers at the speed that battery packs can be manufactured.
But this is just the first half of the plan.
The second half is much better.
From a small business, entreperenurial and especially social enterprise and collaborative production point of view, once low-income neighborhoods are net energy producers, they can organize, cooperate and collaborate in countless other ways.
Further technology investments can be made at much lower costs, because there is a local and independent electricity grid to support them, which leads to development, local production and especially peer production and cultural development, and even local trade.
I’m not going to go too deep down the path of what is possible there, but it opens up all sorts of avenues at the level of inter-community projects and development over larger areas.
With the electricity costs for 3D printing covered, local production of goods in a globally distributed knowledge-ecosystem becomes possible. The only thing left to do is for someone to invest in a technological pathway for bioplastics instead of biodesel, and both 3D printing and solar electricity become self-replicating with a production cost of zero.
But that’s another story.
Back to the future of airplanes now.
Musk is already working on cars, rockets and underground transportation.
That covers all modes of travel except for planetary flight.
If you have the technology for space travel, you can engineer your way to airplanes. And in this case, there are intermediary steps.
Flying cars are a few years away, and self-driving cars are more or less already happening. Both will require AI, and Tesla already has the niche learning cycles for self-driving. Musk’s deep learning company, OpenAI, is developing AI in the general sense — the sense that, when mature enough, allows you to take deep learning and apply it to any niche.
Such as going from self-driving cars to self-flying cars, which I wager is a simpler technology, and in terms of physics, easier to handle than landing the Falcon Heavy after atmospheric re-entry.
Flying cars are a step up towards general flight, but they still require individual ownership, or rental in urban areas.
Planetary flight as a factor of sustainable global mobility requires two things: a sustainable global battery array for solar, and electric commercial airplanes.
The airline industry predicts 10 years until commercial airliners could go fully electric.
The big performance hiccup is battery power.
Tesla’s home field.
US-based startup Wright Electric is working to create a 120–186 seat electric aircraft with a 335 mile range. Every other electric plane being designed has much smaller capacity, with Boeing’s 12 passenger plane produced by Seattle startup Zunum Aero being the most spacious. NASA, too, is in the game, with its X-57 two-seater.
Airbus Vahana
Airbus has two projects, the Vahana (single seat) and the CityAirbus (four seats), both self-piloted and both meant for urban use. Vertical take-off, obstacle avoidance and complex navigation: when coupled with low operating costs, Airbus plans on competing with taxis in urban spaces.
I’m going to cut to the chase.
The world is obviously moving towards electric airliners. If you Google it, you can feel the trend. Green, low-noise, friendlier near or within cities, it’s a huge business move.
And the only company with the battery tech to actually lead in this space is Tesla. It’s not just the technology onboard the airplane, it’s the whole ecosystem. How you charge planes, where the energy for charging comes from, and how it is stored.
Tesla has the end to end technology to pull it off and do it sustainabily, which is the key metric for marketing this in the future.
If the airplane is electric, but the electricity used to charge it is not sustainable, you haven’t really pulled off sustainable flight.
Tesla’s infrastructure would be not just sustainable, but grid-independent.
Once Tesla has the modular global battery array it’s aiming to build, with individual home units connected into giant virtual power plants, the next logical move are electric airplanes.
If you had to bet, would you say Elon Musk is aware of this?
He probably has been for a while. It would be a natural offshoot of SpaceX.
And once Tesla has commercial electric flight, it no longer needs to monetize electricity by relying on the antiquated power grid.
In fact, even running battery plants like the one in South Australia at a loss, and building as many of them as possible as fast as possible would be a winning move. Building the momentum and political cred to obtain various form of investments and subsidies for turning entire low-income areas into net energy producers and instant-acting, smart virtual power plants.
Then change the whole game by adding a different layer of monetization and technology.
They would turn low-income neighborhoods into dynamic equity holders in global mobility.
And make zero-emissions global mobility possible.
The gains in prosperity and collaborative potential for the species, on a global scale, starting with otherwise segregated low-income communities would be immense.
At some point in the process, self-flying commercial planes and an AI flight grid for both self-flying cars and planes becomes the status quo, but that’s another story.
There’s a lot of ‘other stories’ here.
Such as, Musk is looking to upend the electricity storage and production monetization scheme anyway, regardless of electric commercial flight.
It’s essential for Tesla’s lifestyle proposition — turning electricity charging for Tesla cars from reliable and financially sound into limitless and abundant.
The power grid runs what? Homes and transportation mostly, from a consumer standpoint. In a more general sense: businesses, civic infrastructure, social entertainment and social services.
Tesla is connecting the consumer part, homes and transportation interlinked in one electric continuum. Into a self-assembling modular mesh of independent and smart electricity generation and storage units.
Once it’s done that, it has its own economy, and right now, it’s approaching this equation from all sides.
Providing perfect solutions on the consumer end, innovating and providing services in a globally-scalable manner on the power grid end.
There is not one piece of the puzzle for electric commercial flight that isn’t already moving in place for Tesla.
And there is not a single company that is anywhere close to having as many pieces aligned, not Airbus, not NASA, not Boeing, and none of the startups entering the playing field.
It’s the perfect power move.